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The Latest Scoop On The Ice Cream Man

(Saturday, October 28, 2006) - Ben Cohen founded Ben & Jerry's ice cream in 1978 with his junior high classmate Jerry Greenfield. Today, Cohen remains on the Ben & Jerry's payroll but spends most of his time as president of Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, a group of 650 executives who want to shift federal spending away from defense and into social needs. Cohen and the group have attracted attention for their lively organizing efforts, such as using stacks of Oreo cookies to convey the size of the defense budget.

Cohen was in San Francisco recently to attend the Bioneers conference, a benefit for the Rainforest Action Network and an event for a progressive political action committee organized by Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland. Cohen stopped by The Chronicle for a Q&A with small-business columnist Ilana DeBare. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Ben & Jerry's was sold to Unilever in 2000. What's your role there today?

A: I show up every once in a while. Sometimes the company does activities that promote various social causes that I agree with, so I participate in those. Recently, the company did a campaign about reducing our nuclear arsenal -- taking the $10 billion we would save from cutting the arsenal in half and using it for kids and schools. Jerry and I were active in promoting that campaign.

Q: Two really big turning points for the company were when you took it public, and then when it was bought by Unilever. If you had to do it all over, would you do those two things again?

A: When we first took the company public, it was an offering available only to people who lived in Vermont -- our community, the people who had supported us from the beginning -- and it was a very deliberate decision to spread the wealth. Then, as the company needed more money and people wanted some liquidity, we went public nationally.

I've learned now that there would have been ways for me to maintain control of the company along with being publicly held on a national basis. If I had it to do all over again, I would have worked the legal end of it differently. There are ways to be publicly held yet remain independent and continue to use your business as a force for social change.

Q: Since the Unilever takeover, your relationship with the company has had ups and downs. There was a period when you felt like the company was not fulfilling its mission.

A: Yes, that's true. And during those times, I was much less active with the company. But now the company is being run by a guy named Walt Freese who happens to agree with the original mission -- believes in it personally, and also believes that it's a critical component of the so-called brand of Ben & Jerry's.

Q: What's he doing differently from his predecessor?

A: He's actively looking for ways to integrate social concerns into how the company does business. (He backed) the idea of focusing on three areas -- global warming, family farms and budget priorities -- and he's come up with flavors that support those things. He's maintained our purchases from Vermont family farmers.

It's a difficult task for him, because he needs to deal with the short-term, bottom-line, profit-maximizing mentality of Unilever.

Q: It seems a lot of small companies with similar social missions have been bought by large corporations, like Odwalla being bought by Coca-Cola. Is this a positive or negative trend?

A: I think it's mostly negative. The idea that you have a two-part bottom line (profit for the company, social benefits for the community) is critical to driving the social involvement of these companies. If you end up getting bought by a company that does not have a double bottom line, then it's kind of all over.

Q: What advice would you give to someone starting a business like you & Jerry did in 1978?

A: Lead with your values. Do something you believe in, something that feeds your soul. If the excitement is just about making money, I don't think that's going to work long-term.

Q: What's the goal of Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities?

A: The mission is to fund social needs -- education, health care, world hunger, energy independence and even a little debt reduction -- at no additional cost by reducing Cold War-era weapons expenditures.

Larry Korb, the former assistant secretary of defense under Reagan, identified $60 billion worth of Cold War weapons we are building every year (such as the F/A-22 fighter jet, the Virginia Class submarine, and much of the country's nuclear arsenal).

For that amount of money you could repair every school in the U.S., plus you could provide health care for every kid in the U.S. who currently doesn't have it. You know those 6 million kids who die every year around the world from starvation? You could provide food self-sufficiency for all of them in addition. It's shocking stuff. And it's irresponsible not to work to make that change. That's what drives me.

Q: People on the left have been pushing to shift spending from military to domestic needs for the past 40 years. Is that still relevant after 9/11, when there is a whole new set of defense needs?

A: It's totally relevant after 9/11. Yes, we have added some money to the Pentagon budget for defending us against terrorism, but we have not stopped spending money on the old threats that no longer exist. ... Congress continues to fund these weapons systems that cost hundreds of billions of dollars that have absolutely no use against terrorism. Any business that ran this way would be out of business.

Q: How does your ice cream background help you get attention for your political views? If you were CEO of a business-to-business software company, I don't think you would be invited to talk about the national budget by TV hosts like Tavis Smiley.

A: It's interesting: I've often wished I were a CEO who ran a business-to-business software company in order to do the job I'm doing now.

The nice thing about having been an ice cream man is that you're always an ice cream man, and people have very positive associations with ice cream and ice cream men. The other nice part is that with the budget, we're dealing with what most people at first blush see as a very complex, dry, big-numbers-that'll-give-you-a-headache kind of issue. In order to get people engaged, we need to make it fun, interesting, entertaining, easy to understand. So having it associated with ice cream certainly doesn't hurt.

But in terms of the message that we're trying to get across -- that serious, hard-nosed bottom-line businesspeople are on board with this idea -- the ice cream guy is not really the best spokesman.

Q: Now for the really important questions. What's your favorite flavor?

A: Cherry Garcia.

Q: And what happened to the beard?

A: I went to trim my beard and I forgot to put the right attachment on the beard trimmer and I shaved this big hole in my beard and I said, "Ah, what the heck, I'll go all the way."

Now I really like it. You don't have to worry about catching food in it. And when you're in my line of work, and you're licking ice cream cones a lot, a beard does tend to get in the way.

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